Letting Go

This week I came back to work after being off for 3 weeks. Having a little ‘mini’ break made me realise how far my class has come this year.  Also suddenly having a migraine appear while teaching showed me once again how independent my class were. While I desperately tried to appear cool and calm as my eyes began to ‘fuzz’ over, my class just got on with what they needed to do. Everyone was doing their work and knew exactly what they had to complete. And although I was suffering, I couldn’t help but smile as it highlighted so many positives in our journey to a MLE.

Although we have experimented with our room layouts, sitting arrangements, designated areas, for me it has been more about the learning process.  This whole year one key statement has rung true with me; it is not about the building. Modern Learning Environments (MLEs) are designed to support ‘multimodal’ learning styles, as well as collaborative communication styles something you can still do in a single cell classroom.

I started off by trying to get the class to become more independent and learn at their own pace and style. To be honest, I found my students weren’t very independent and relied on me too much to tell them what to do.  I will be honest, it hasn’t been easy. There are times when I feel some students are not being productive and my main concern is will the work get completed? I know I am still driven by the ‘finished’ work philosophy and that can be quite a hard label to get rid of. Sometimes though, it is about the journey they are making to that final destination that can tell me more about their learning than the actual finished product.

I started off simple and blocked an hour per day to start off with. During that time, I took a mixture of reading and writing  groups. The rest of the class had the opportunity to do their set tasks for as long as they liked. The only criterion was that they had to have a certain number completed by the end of the week. Therefore they choose when they completed the activities not me. If there was any teaching aspect to any of the activities, I put a tutorial up on our class page where they could view it. That meant they could take their time to learn it, rewind, pause as much as they liked until they got it! Other activities were read to self or others, free writing (they wrote anything they liked), word study, touch typing, handwriting, blogging, spelling etc.

It was simple and starting off with an hour was manageable for me. It also meant the class learnt to self-manage themselves and make vital decision about how to make the most of their time. I would be lying if I said the whole class was perfect! Yes, I still had to direct some and set criteria’s for them but that is part of the journey. On the whole, most of my students were able to get on with their work without the presents of the teacher.

To an outsider it may have looked chaotic.  But the class was actually learning! It is one of those times where I had wished I had used a camera to record the beginning of the year to illustrate the progress they have made. What I see are children learning to manage their time, understand the way they learn and how to be successful – a lot of what we try to teach them as part of our school values.

Next term, I would like to try and visit a few other schools to see how they do this. I know mine is quite basic and I would like to expand so I have at least half the day set up like this.